The death of Clyde Griffiths - the end of the picaroon?

Abstract

The article is the seventh, concluding chapter of the study “The second death of Lazarus, in the State of New York". It starts with the psychological review of the third part of the novel An Americal Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, of the chapters whose contents present a thanatological problem (death sentence). Seen from the ontological point of view, the death of Clyde Griffiths represents an important, and from the literary point of view, meaningful locus in the history of the novel with a picaresque theme. There were then, and there are now, denials of the possibility of a picaresque theme in American prose. On the whole, American criticism regards their picaroon as a peripheral phenomenon, as a topical adaptation of the European phenomenon (as a social climber, parvenu). Clyde, child of poor parentage, however, embodies the picaresque tradition. And he is not alone in his time: his company are characters by Farrell, Fitzgerald, Bellow... Yet, his all too early death marks departure from the old matrix, identifying itself with the improved version of the picaresque “fortune hunter" from the times of European Romanticism (Stendhal, Balzac). Therefore this interpretation takes Clyde's death separately, primarily because it suggests the necessity of the break with the I-form as a constitutive factor of the true (Spanish) picaresque story. The author thinks that the third person, he, is the epistemological question of the evolution of the aesthetic practice of the novel of this type. This evolution is particularly manifested in the Bildungsroman in the American style in which the picaresque desire is transformed and withers. Two trends contribute to the disintegration of its novel phenomenology: the first is the modification of the meaning of the “American myth" and the second, the personalisation of the content, conditioned by the state called agonized conscience. Therefore, following the analysis of the “case" of The Adventures of Augie March by S. Bellow, a novel with a restored (original) picaresque matrix, the author concludes that three causes are “to blame" for the death of the picaroon and the destruction of the picaresque desire, three anchors that have been dragging the ship, the emblem of the picaresque: the hope of the possibility of existence of the kingdom of fancy, the hope of the omnipotence of money, ana the belief in God... The last moments of life of Clyde Griffiths are the best illustration for that.